Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689660
ISSN1539-7858
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreePeculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment MimesisRoger Mathew GrantRoger Mathew GrantPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore"They're laughing at the opera, they're splitting their sides with laughter!"1 Or at least so claimed Paul H. D. d'Holbach, whose words would have been no small matter when they were penned in 1752. The Paris Opéra had been "profaned," he satirically wrote, by "senseless laughter and indecent gaiety."2 As the home of sung French tragedy, or tragédie en musique, the Paris Opéra was a most unusual place for comedy.3 A space for gods and heroes, for love and death and classical ideals, the opera treasured there was nothing to laugh about. But that summer a small traveling group of Italian opera buffa performers took up residency at the Opéra, bringing to Paris for the first time a new form of comic opera that was slowly spreading across Europe from its origins in Neapolitan theatres. This new form of comic opera lampooned the traditions of its tragic counterpart. Its stories concerned aspirational servants and hapless old misers, bumbling, pretentious losers and the tricksters who could hoodwink them with outrageous disguises. Though smaller in cast and in duration, it specialized in the overblown. Everything about it was exaggerated: the stage action and gesture, the inappropriate sentiments, the antics of the plot, and, most of all, the music.Comic opera presented a challenge to the Enlightenment aesthetic doctrine of mimesis. Until the mid-eighteenth century, critics had seen opera as a union of poetry with music on the stage. Each moment in the drama employed these forces together to create a coherent image and action, using stock musical figures and procedures to amplify the intended affect of the drama. Especially in the case of French criticism, music was understood to be subservient to the poetry of the libretto; even in passages without singing, the music of the opera was tied to the expression of its text.4 Using these procedures, opera fell into accord with the neoclassical doctrine of mimesis, in which the goal of art was the imitation of the natural world. Comic opera originated, in part, as a parodic, metatheatrical critique of this operatic aesthetic.5 Composers of comic opera adopted several new mimetic techniques that mocked the ossified musical procedures of serious opera and, further, the neoclassical mimetic doctrine itself. These composers employed mimesis in exaggerated, excessive, and rapidly changing forms; they also began to use poetry and music as autonomous signifying systems, engaging in musical mimesis to suggest something other than what was expressed in the opera's poetry and thereby subverting the meaning of the text. These practices bolstered the relatively new notion that music had the power to act as a sign independent of poetry.The growing awareness of comic opera's peculiar use of mimesis and of its distinctive musical style facilitated a transformation in operatic aesthetics. Curiously, instead of creating a more expansive mimetic theory to accommodate the new Italian style, critics explicitly turned away from this neoclassical doctrine in favor of a new view in which music, independently, was said to attune its audience to an affective state. In the domain of aesthetic theory, then, the extreme mimesis in this music was no longer mimetic. It was instead affective.Precisely because the historiography of comic opera is tightly associated with the aesthetics of mimesis, the important role that this musical idiom played in catalyzing a reassessment of the mimetic doctrine has not always been apparent. Instead, historians and theorists of this repertoire have traditionally emphasized its contributions to the development of mimetic techniques in music.6 But one result of the critical quarrel on comic opera was the theoretical displacement of mimetic representation by affective attunement. Seen from this perspective, the twenty-first century's turn to affect is only the most recent motion of an ongoing dialectic concerning affect and signification that has been in place since early modernity. Comic opera and the debates that it incited have much to teach us about this crucial moment in intellectual history.Mimesis Exploded: Three Comic OperasTo be sure, there was something immediately appealing, new, and funny about Italian opera buffa for Parisian audiences. Recalling Giuseppe Maria Orlandini's Il marito giocatore (which had its Paris premier in August of that infamous 1752 summer), the conservative critic Élie-Catherine Fréron noted with some disdain that the opera provoked "convulsions" and "extravagant movements" in the parterre. "It couldn't better resemble the sort of delirium that always follows the excessive exaggeration caused by strong alcohol."7 But what Fréron describes as immoderate behavior in the audience could also have aptly characterized the action on stage in any one of the works that the troupe of bouffons brought to Paris. Part of what made this type of comic opera so fresh and so controversial was the way in which it used music to mock serious opera, creating the hyperbolic exploits Fréron describes.Perhaps the best known of the works performed during the bouffons' three-year tenure in Paris is Pergolesi's La serva padrona, an opera about the plucky servant Serpina who convinces her employer Uberto to marry her. The life of a housemaid doesn't suit her; she wants to be "revered like a mistress. Arch-mistress! Mega-mistress!"8 In order to pull off this caper, she disguises her fellow servant Vespone as her new potential husband: a mean-spirited ruffian soldier she calls Captain Tempesta. In a brilliantly manipulative aria, "A Serpina penserete," she asks Uberto to think of her from time to time when she's gone and to remember how good she was to him. Of course, she reasons, Uberto will marry her to avoid losing her, and also to avoid the dowry he would have to pay Tempesta."A Serpina penserete" explodes the mimetic conventions of the serious opera aria with an overload of mimesis. The aria begins in a stately, slow tempo with a corresponding 4/4 meter; Seprina's lines of entreaty are smooth and sweet, and on their own they could even sound earnestly saccharine. But accompanying them we hear a passage of quickly repeated, detached, staccato pitches in the orchestra that undercuts the sincerity of her text. This orchestral commentary begins just before Serpina sings her lines directed toward Uberto, and it returns as she is finishing them. It employs mimesis in the form of an orchestral agitation in order to deliver more information than is offered in the text of the aria, suggesting an anxiety in Serpina's bluffing performance within the performance. Suddenly, just as soon as she concludes her words to Uberto, Serpina launches into her own solipsistic world, singing to herself and the audience in a brisk allegro tempo and in 3/8, a meter associated with peasant dances and frivolity. The effect is a dramatic, unanticipated change of character. "It seems to me that he's already slowly beginning to soften!" she exclaims.9 Then the slow tempo and the 4/4 meter return just as abruptly as they had left, and Seprina repeats her original sentiment, again directed toward Uberto and again agitated by the staccato figure in the orchestra. Twice more the aria rapidly changes character, with Serpina asking Uberto to please forget any of her bad behavior and remarking, again to herself, that the squeeze of his hand is a sign that her plot is working.The entire scene is exaggeration, with Serpina's insincere serenade accompanied by the anxious violins and placed directly back-to-back with her joyous and energetic interior monologue. Serpina effectively listens to herself perform the aria; the music she sings as an aside comments on the song she directs to Uberto. Although eighteenth-century arias often contained a single contrasting emotion expressed in the interior of their form, the many abrupt changes in meter, tempo, and character of "A Serpina penserete" were far more drastic than what was typically heard in the Paris Opéra.10 This aria attempted to outdo mimesis with emotional portrayal that was simultaneously more exacting—altering the entire musical fabric with each rapidly encountered emotion—and also more formally complex, with each different affective disposition commenting metatheatrically on those around it. The result was a style of performance that was aware of itself as performance in its formal shifts of perspective.La serva padrona was not the only one of Pergolesi's works to arrive in Paris with the bouffons. The less well-known but equally adventurous Livietta e Tracollo had its Paris premiere in May of 1753. This is another work that doubles mimetic procedures through performances within performances; the opera begins with every character in disguise. Livietta, dressed as a French country boy, and her friend Fulvia, wearing false jewels, are attempting to seek revenge against the thief Tracollo, who is himself disguised as an old Polish woman (the disguise is musically complete with an entrance aria that sounds like a traditional Polish Mazurka dance in 3/8 meter with emphases on the second beat of each measure). After a tussle in which both parties pretend to be incompetent in the Italian language, Livietta reveals her identity and calls for Tracollo's imprisonment. The second act begins with Tracollo in a new disguise. This time he has dressed himself up as an old, insane astronomer in a bid to win Livietta over. Here again, Pergolesi's score clothes the character in appropriate costume. The libretto indicates that Tracollo should gesticulate and "laugh indecently" (sconciamente ride), and we hear the orchestra perform this task for him.11 Just before his first lines, the violins rip upward in two iterations of a rapidly ascending scale, descending from their height at half the pace in staccato pulses. The result is something that sounds like an arching of the back and filling of the chest followed by a bursting cackle in a high register. "I seem to be doing this well," Tracollo says of his new-found character. "But in pretending, I really don't want to go, as they say, off my rocker" (L, p. 11; trans. mod.).12 The orchestra concludes each of his lines with more instrumental laughter.Tracollo is constantly transforming. A character that is always playing a character, his troped mimetic representations destabilize traditional mimetic technique. In this scene his exaggerated peculiarity is emphasized in the orchestral cackling, which lends the otherwise inconsistent and elastic Tracollo a temporary mechanical rigidity.13 Later in the opera, as he watches what he thinks is Livietta's death (she is faking it), he is overtaken by her body's flailing, dying motions and begins to act them out with his own body while punctuating each one with a sung "ha" (L, p. 14).14 Tracollo, like many comic opera characters, is an empty vessel ready to receive any distinct persona or action.15 He is in some ways like the malleable tones of music itself, adaptable to the presentation of a broad palate of affects.Parisians heard many kinds of orchestral laughter during the tenure of the bouffons. Rinaldo di Capua's La zingara, which received its premiere at the Paris Opéra in June of 1753, contains several experimental scenes that employ this effect. Nisa, our female protagonist, has contrived to simultaneously rob and also marry the elderly miser Calcante. She enlists the help of her brother, Tagliaborsi, who is disguised as a bear. The opera begins with the two siblings on stage, and in his first aria Tagliaborsi complains that Nisa is laughing at him in the bear suit while he suffers its constraints. Immediately after he sings "you laugh" (that is, "you're laughing at me"), Taglioborsi halts for a moment, and we hear the orchestra perform a high, rapid, descending figure in the violins—just long enough for a short chuckle. This device—which is traditionally mimetic, using orchestral sound during a break in Tagliaborsi's singing—is repeated fourteen times in the short aria to solidify its effect.Later, Nisa convinces Calcante that the bear in her company is in fact a famous and talented animal, and she sells it to him for twenty ducats. Calcante is quite pleased with his purchase, imagining that this famous bear will fetch more than a thousand when he offers it for sale. While he is celebrating his good fortune, Tagliaborsi quickly slips away. Calcante, now shocked and horrified, laments his financial ruin in an accompanied recitative that is particularly innovative. He begins to sing haltingly—"Where, where could the bear have gone?"—and the orchestra fills in his pauses with high, rapid turning figures reminiscent of the orchestral chuckles in Tagliaborsi's aria.16 The music settles for a moment in G major, and its quick, light giddiness taunts Calcante as he searches hopelessly for the bear. "My poor ducats! They've gone to hell!" he exclaims.17 Any seriousness with which we could possibly take this old Scrooge is undercut by the lighthearted orchestral accompaniment.18In Rinaldo's ingenious writing, we hear one sentiment expressed in the text with a contrasting feeling provided in the musical design. The opera's music gives us a way to regard comically what is otherwise expressed in serious words. Although this method of using music against the text eventually became common in opera composition, it was unprecedented in the mid-eighteenth century, when Parisian audiences attempted to make sense of the new Italian style. Music, it seemed, was being employed as an independent aesthetic force, not limited to the expression or enhancement of the opera's poetry.19It was bad enough that people in the parterre were laughing indecently, but Pergolesi and Rinaldo put laughter, impropriety, and bad behavior on center stage, using orchestral devices to inflate, surpass, and comment on the text. In so doing they parodied the very notion of mimesis, ridiculing the formulaic ceremony of serious opera in which sung tragedy used stock musical gestures to support its poetry. Serious opera worked to depict a unified image in each scene, while comic opera changed them out even more frequently than its casts changed disguises. The characters we meet in these early comic operas are the prototypes for those more famous comic opera characters from the late eighteenth century, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Leporello (from Don Giovanni, an Italian opera buffa) or the Queen of the Night (from Die Zauberflöte, a German Singspiel). Leporello runs his mouth on an unbelievable list at breakneck speed, and the Queen (who has no proper name; she is pure role) sings an aria requiring robotic pyrotechnics with popped high notes in the stratosphere of the soprano range. Their depictions are at once evocative of "something mechanical encrusted upon the living"—Bergson's formula for the comic—but also metatheatrically critical of the typical mimetic conventions of the opera.20 The unexpected consequence was that this excess of mimesis destabilized the entire discourse surrounding music, an art whose purchase on mimesis was already tenuous.Critical QuarrelWith performances like these, it was no wonder that everyone was talking about the opera. The arrival of the bouffons in Paris provoked a massive pamphlet war on the nature of opera and on musical aesthetics more generally. More than sixty pamphlets on the topic were printed and exchanged between 1752 and 1754, as defenders and detractors alike attempted to formulate what, exactly, was so thrilling or so objectionable about the comic Italian music.21 Now known as the querelle des bouffons, the debate reignited the issues of an older French controversy: a musical version of the early modern quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which had already included within it an interrogation of the limits of music's capacity to express outside of or beyond the operatic text.22 The new quarrel placed increasing pressure on this question in particular.There has been an understandable tendency in studies of the querelle des bouffons to see a polarization of opinions divided sharply between the supporters of serious, French opera (the coin du roi, or king's corner) and supporters of comic, Italian opera (the coin de la reine, or queen's corner). Typically, those in favor of the new Italian style are seen as the forward-thinking progressives; this group includes the Parisian encyclopedists Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, and Denis Diderot, among others. The supporters of French opera are seen, by contrast, as a conservative group clinging to an older notion of operatic propriety; the members of this group are less well-known, as are their writings.23Apart from the clear duality organized around the two different repertoires, there was in fact a great deal of consensus among critics in the quarrel. Contributors agreed that something very different was at work in the music of the comic Italian operas—whether they enjoyed it or reviled it—and that this musical difference required new theoretical tools or language for musical style itself. In this sense, both sides of the debate worked to stabilize the notion that music was an aesthetic force independent of language.24 Up until this point, writers on music and aesthetics had generally understood musical tones to convey and supplement the meaning of a text. Music without words was considered something of a form without a content, like random splashes of paint thrown against a canvas (as Charles Batteaux had it)25 or, in the words of Noël-Antoine Pluche, like "a fine suit separated from a body and hung from a peg."26 Music without a text lacked a certain essence. It was the costume without the actor. It failed to communicate anything with specificity.Because critics felt compelled to account for the musical differences between the French and Italian styles, they stumbled onto a new set of questions about music's capacity for mimesis. Since art was supposed to be mimetic, the question had to be asked: what, if anything, was the basis of music's mimetic power—what was it that the sound of music itself displayed? If music could be said to work mimetically, was it successful in its task? Answers to these questions were far from uniform along party lines in the debate, with both sides drawing on different aspects of the history of aesthetics in order to account for the new and provocative situation before them. While some authors insisted on grounding their account of the new style in mimetic theory, others doubted that this was even possible.Among those who theorized the new Italian style along mimetic lines was a critic writing under the name Rousselet, who pointed out that in its reproductions of the world Italian opera had managed to depict all of the "little things" of mundane existence. The objects of its comic depiction were always "the petty and the low." French opera, by contrast, "does not debase itself to these puerilities."27 Another, anonymous critic voiced the same objection in the form of a dialogue between a supporter of the new Italian style and a conservative Lullyste—a supporter of traditional French opera and its seventeenth-century master, Jean-Baptiste Lully.Paintings! Replied the [pro-Italian] musician, eh! This is where we shine. What richness! What profusions in our Italian opera! Everything is painted from tears, to laughter, to sneezes…. Your Lully had only one color for each image, which was sometimes tinged but basically dominant throughout. He never knew the science of details. We have varied designs for almost every modulation of the phrase; one also sometimes sees a single syllable artistically decorated and delicately fluttered over one or two octaves presenting four different images at the same time.Eh! It is this piling up of designs, replied the Lullyste, it is this clever decorating which is a hundred thousand miles from nature.28For this anonymous critic, the varied and exaggerated use of music as a mimetic medium actually detracted from the often-repeated goal of the eighteenth-century neoclassical mimetic doctrine: the imitation of the beautiful in nature. Rather than working to supplement the clear images of the text, the music of the Italians was all distraction, filigree, and falseness, attempting to depict far more than it was able.Jean-Baptiste Jourdan was even more skeptical, wondering how it was that musical tones could really depict anything substantial. He equated the folly of the Italian opera's comic characters with the semantic imprecision of music as a medium, wondering what on earth something like a musical flourish could possibly represent. Discussing the musical decoration at the conclusion of a melodic line (a cadenza), Jourdan wrote, "I would very much like for your philosophers of the Coin de la Reine … who have read in Aristotle that the arts are an imitation of nature, to tell me honestly what one paints with a cadenza. Would it not be a drunk who, weak in the legs, wavers, beats the walls, comes, goes, slides to the ground, gets up, and finally falls to be applauded?"29 Turning a musical figure into a comic opera character—a clumsy lush—Jourdan reversed comic opera's mimickry. Rather than using musical tones for ridicule, instead he ridiculed musical tones by drawing them into an equation with sloppy bodily gestures, making an embarrassment of their materiality. Just as some subjects were deemed unfit for depiction on the stage, Jourdan intended a disqualification of music from the power of signification.Among the most outspoken of the Italian opera's champions was Rousseau, whose scathing Lettre sur la musique françoise was a thoroughgoing condemnation of the French operatic style. For Rousseau the advantage of Italian opera was clear. The Italian language, with its sonorous, bright vowels, was more suited to song, and Italian composers were more adept at choosing the precise moments for modulations of the harmony and changes of meter. Most of all, though, Italian opera was primarily structured around its melodies. Its accompaniments, sometimes thin, existed only to support the voice and to reinforce what Rousseau called the "unity of melody" (a concept with classical roots).30 Melody, Rousseau believed, possessed the power to imitate humanity's natural, passionate utterances. It was an echo of the antediluvian cries of primitive man, which were simultaneously speech and song. "Italian melody," he explained, "finds in every movement the expressions for every character and paintings for every object."31 Through the power of the voice, Italian opera was supreme in musical mimesis.Rousseau's assessment draws on a long history of theorizing musical mimesis with reference to the voice. Especially in French neoclassical criticism—precisely of the variety typically used to uphold the values of serious French opera—the power of musical mimesis belonged to song. As Jean-Baptiste Dubos had put it as early as 1719, "just as the painter imitates the features and colors of nature, so too the musician imitates the tones, accents, sighs, inflections of the voice, and, in short, all of those sounds with which nature exudes the sentiments and passions. These, as we have already seen, hold a marvelous power to move us, because they are the signs of the passions instituted by nature, whence they receive their energy."32 Traditionally taken as a component of the conservative view that would have subordinated the power of musical tones to that of the text they expressed, Rousseau repurposed this neoclassical understanding of musical mimesis such that it supported a kind of music that did no such thing. With attention to the ways in which critics interpreted and employed various understandings of mimesis to their own ends, it becomes clear that the debate over comic opera only intensified the need for clarification on how, exactly, music was a mimetic art.It wasn't long after Rousseau issued his missive that Fréron responded with a lengthy, multipart defense of French opera.33 Point by point, he took on Rousseau's provocations. Quoting a passage in which Rousseau extols the ability of the Italian style to depict "all characters imaginable," Fréron had occasion to instruct Rousseau on music's mimetic capabilities. Music, Fréron insisted, appeals to the ear. Therefore, it can only imitate things which are themselves sounds or which produce sounds. Fréron anticipated the objections; if music can only imitate things which are themselves sounded, it would seem to be a very limited art. How then, ought we to account for the fact that music moves us? In response, Fréron elaborated an alternative way of thinking through the problem:Experience demonstrates that music inspires sentiments and passions, but it neither expresses them nor paints them. Please do not to lose sight of this distinction. In order to make myself understood, I am obliged to enter into a mechanical examination of the effects of music on the human body.It is a proven experience that if you pluck one of two strings tuned in unison, the other will experience a very sensible vibration, and will create a sound. The human body contains a multitude of nerves of different lengths and of different thicknesses, stretched to differing degrees. It is through them, as you know, that the soul receives its impressions. The chords of harmony that the musician passes over find themselves—regardless of the key—in unison with a more or less large number of nerves; these are then made to sound, they feel the vibrations and, by the inviolable laws of nature, allow the soul to experience sensations which, always more or less strong, are relative to the number of respective unisons.34Operating neither mimetically nor expressively, music in Fréron's view attuned its audience to various sensations through its physical vibrations. Musicians were not simply supplying the live soundtrack to a series of representations; in his model they were said to create affect itself. Fréron removed the problematic responsibility of mimetic depiction from music altogether, replacing it instead with an affective attunement predicated on the basis of music's material reality in sound vibrations. To be sure, his account of music's affective force was a limited one; the chief goal of music, he went on to say, is to "render more sensible the situation that the poet describes."35 Nevertheless, in his effort to defend serious French opera he completely reoriented the traditional formula connecting mimetic depiction with affect.The concept of mimesis—with its long intellectual heritage—is expansive enough to include Fréron's theory of attunement. But to understand it in this way is to miss the explicit rejection of the mimetic framework that he and other period critics proposed.36 On the one hand, Fréron was drawing on the Neoplatonic notion of musica humana, in which the human body is described as an instrument and its parts tuned in harmonious ratios. Musica humana is a microcosmography of the harmony of the spheres—or musica mundana—and an analog of human music making, musica instrumentalis. Transmitted through medieval music theory, the musica humana tradition had also found its way into theories of the affects by the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury, for instance, had equated the affective disposition of the human as a kind of attunement in his 1711 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. "Upon the whole," he wrote, "it may be said properly to be the same with the affections or passions in an animal constitution, as with the cords or strings of a musical instrument…. It might be agreeable, one would think, to inquire thus into the different tunings of the passions, the various mixtures and allays by which men become so different from one another."37 For Shaftesbury, affective dispositions were dictated by the tuning in which the instrument of the body was set. Fréron extended this notion to include sensations passed on to the soul through the vibrations of music's sounds.On the other hand, Fréron was responding to the growing consensus that musical tones constituted their own signifying system, which was a view he shared with Rousseau and with other proponents of the Italian style. Among these strange bedfellows was Friedrich Melchoir Grimm, the author of several pamphlets supporting Italian comic opera in the querelle. In his article "Poeme lyrique" for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, Grimm describes music as an independent, universally accessible semiotic system; "Music is a language," he writes plainly.38 Not only this, music for Grimm has a metalinguistic function, since as a "universal language" it "speaks the language of all nations and all ages."39 Rather than simply duplicating the power of language, music operates on our faculties directly; it "strikes our senses and our imagination immediately. It is also by its very nature the language of passion and feeling. Its expressions, going straight to the heart without passing, so to speak through the mind, must produce effects known in no other idiom."40 The view of music as a nondiscursive, corporeal, and affective medium crystalized the period's twin goals of explaining how music could act as a sign and also how it managed to move its audiences successfully without access to the mimetic capabilities of the other arts.41The clearest parallel to Fréron's account of affective attunement is in the work of Diderot. An early translator of Shaftesbury, Diderot had already begun to sketch an account of musical attunement in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, published just a year before the arr
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